The Lab

BaselWorld: The Moment of Truth (Part I)

We have arrived at this year’s BaselWorld. As always, we are keeping very busy with meetings with journalists, agents, retailers, and interested watch aficionados. It is our second year at BaselWorld and we can really feel the huge interest in our watches and instruments and our special LW illustration universe.

Going to Basel each year takes a lot of planning. It is not only launching new watches and instruments, but also designing a stand within many constraints, creating a catalogue that becomes a collectable, preparing market analysis and business key notes, and getting the whole LW team ready to meet inquiring minds.

I know that you have been waiting in anticipation to see the Oktopus Tattoo, which I have been sharing with you for the past six months. We have spent a lot of time on developing this watch… numerous case prototypes have been done to find just the right look of the tattoo engravings on the case.

As we decided to use the F. Piguet cal. 1150 for this watch, we also had to change the inner case, and adjust the design of the hands. Because of this, we did not receive the final prototypes until the opening day of BaselWorld two days ago… and here are pictures to show this avant-garde LW creation, which is creating a lot of talk and interest down here.

We had the Tattoo design made by famous Danish tattoo artist Henning Jensen of Royal Tattoo. We then applied this ancient tattoo style to a modern watch design by engraving the tattoo onto the Oktopus case – a process which is very complex and covers 18 different engraving steps. We also changed the design of the hands to compliment the octopus engravings of the case. Furthermore, we used a vivid red SuperLuminova on the hands and indexes, to make the watch stand out in a crowd.

Last week we gave you an in-depth review of our Oktopus Moonphase and the ideas behind this creation. This week I can show you a live picture of this beautiful piece, with the very special moonphase-indicator with countdown function.

Next week we will have some more pictures from BaselWorld and a video as well, so stay tuned. Back to the fair…